GED Offers ‘Minimal Value’

By

Mary Pilon

Jun 25, 2010 5:00 am ET

Is the GED worthless?

That’s a question at the heart of research from Nobel laureate Prof. James J. Heckman, and his University of Chicago co-authors Nicholas S. Mader and John Eric Humphries, in their working paper “The GED”

The GED “is America’s largest high school,” says Mader, one of the co-authors. “But there’s substantial danger there.”

The GED, shorthand for the General Equivalency Diploma, or General Education Diploma, is an eight-hour exam administered to high school dropouts to establish equivalence between dropouts who pass the exam and traditional high school graduates. In 2008, 12% of all high school credentials issued were GEDs, about 500,000 students a year.

The problem is, however, the GED is of “minimal value” in terms of labor market outcomes, the authors say, and only a handful of GED recipients use it to advance in school or the workplace. The authors cite a study that found that only 31% of GED recipients enrolled in a postsecondary institution and that 77% of those who did only stayed for a single semester.

“The GED is not harmless,” the paper says. “Treating it as equivalent to a high school degree distorts social statistics and gives false signals that America is making progress when it is not.” According to the paper, if GED recipients are counted as dropouts, the African-American male high school graduation rate in 2000 is approximately the same as it was in 1960.

GED recipients may face limited opportunities because they lack skills not related to the test — motivation, self-esteem, reliability, among others — to succeed in higher education and the workplace. The authors acknowledge that there are GED success stories — many smart graduates who merely lack the stamp of a traditional degree and prosper. But the gap between the GED and diploma is still wide. A quarter of GED test-takers say they spend 100 hours or more prepping for the test, which is still more than if they hadn’t studied at all, but the authors point out that the average high school student spends about 1,080 hours in class a year.

Because GEDs have a low cost, some students may be induced to drop out of school, the paper asserts, referencing a National Center for Education Statistics survey that found that 40.5% of high school dropouts cited that it “would be easier to get the GED” among their reasons for leaving school. Another growing share of GED takers are high-school age students, says co-author Humphries. These are students who might be better off considering A traditional high-school diploma or vocational program. Some states, like Virginia, pair GED programs with additional vocational or skills-development programs, which, the authors say, might better prepare students beyond the GED.

Further, GEDs may distort high-school-dropout rates. The exams have enjoyed more widespread usage in incarceration rehabilitation programs, meaning that a growing percentage of GEDs are now coming from the increasing prison population. With some 26% of all prison inmates earning a GED, this growth “weakens its overall signaling value by its association with criminality,” the paper says. Because the gap in experience between those who get GEDs vs. those with traditional diplomas is so wide, lumping them together may be misleading.

The GED, itself, doesn’t provide any additional value in the labor market, the authors say. In fact, an earlier paper co-authored by Heckman found that controlled for certain factors, that male GEDs earned on average 1% less per hour than dropouts. High school graduates made 3.6% more per hour on average than dropouts. Women GEDs earned 1.7% more per hour than dropouts and high school graduates who didn’t attend college earned 10.6% more per hour. However, other research is cited in the paper that indicates that the GED can have some signaling power to employers, offering higher wages to GED recipients than if they didn’t have one.

The GED was born to accommodate World War II vets, many of whom didn’t complete high school before heading to war. The exam was introduced in 1942 and by 1957, civilian testtakers outnumbered veterans. The certification has boomed in recent decades fueled in part by “government programs that promote the GED as a quick fix for addressing the high school dropout problem,” the paper says, likening the GED to “wearing a broken watch and knowing that it is broken.”